World’s Largest Tesla Supercharger Station Under Construction In Shanghai

Tesla has promised 1,000 Superchargers in China by the end of 2017 and its massive Supercharger station in Shangai will make that promise a reality.

Though Tesla is still building the world’s largest Supercharger station in Shanghai, China, you can see from the above picture, and the Reddit video post below, that it’s well underway. Redditor JayinShanghai cruises around the enormous garage to give us an idea of where all the Tesla Superchargers will be located. It seems several units are already in place.

The new station will be located at the Lilacs International Commercial Centre, which is located on Dingxiang Road. Tesla has officially verified that construction is underway on the site, however, the automaker hasn’t confirmed the number of stalls, charging output, or when it may open. Information on Reddit, as well as via Teslarati, suggests that the new station will house about 50 stalls. From the looks of the video this seems like a fair estimate, although, in the end, there may be even more than 50.

We’ve previously reported on the world’s largest Supercharger station, which only has about 20 stalls and is located in Norway. There are others with the same setup currently being installed in California. Additionally, reports have revealed that Tesla is now planning 40-stall stations, and permits reveal that one such station is in the works for an area between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Now that Tesla has two types Supercharger stations, the traditional stations, and the new urban stations, we don’t yet know which type of station will be built in the various areas. Looking at the Shanghai garage would almost make one think that it’s going to be an urban station, but the Superchargers in the video look like the standard style. Nonetheless, Tesla is living up to its promises and expanding the Supercharger network continuously.

39 responses to "World’s Largest Tesla Supercharger Station Under Construction In Shanghai"

Interesting. 50 stalls is huge. I wonder if the increase in charge rate/decrease in charge time will improve over the next few years in balance with the huge increase in BEV’s needing to charge…
Nah. Better keep building more charging stations! LOL!
Seriously, though, I wonder what the usual range of charge rates will be for public chargers in 5 years, both for Tesla and for DCFC’ers.
I have always thought that a real world charge rate of 75 kW would be good enough for 80% of BEV drivers, though I may be a bit optimistic on that issue. But once you get past 75 to 150 kW charge rates, BEVs don’t take THAT much longer to charge than a gasser to refuel. 20 minutes of charging at 150 kW will get you a long ways down the road. How often do drivers of gas cars get out of the gas station in less than 10 minutes?

+10!! Ziv, My buddy and I have been beating that drum for a LONG time. It’s absolutely laughable that the ICE crowd is now reduced to arguing about a sub-10 minute turnaround time on a 500+ mile road trip. Even if that were the case, why would anyone drive a high-maintenance gas guzzler for 95% of their annual driving only to be able to get back on the road in under 10 minutes on a rarely driven long distance road trip? Talk about stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime!

My buddy sums it up best- a 400 mile range car doesn’t matter when you only have a 150 mile bladder!

That is my thought as well, John. Once we get to the point where a 20 minute pit stop will get you enough juice to drive 2 hours at a decent speed, we are 90% of the way there. There will always be holdouts who want to be able to refuel in 5 minutes, or so they will claim, and then drive for another 4 hours, but they will be in the decided minority.
75 kW charge rates are fairly decent, 150 kW charge rates are really good. Anything over 225 kW is pretty much as fast an MOST people could possibly want to refuel.
I mean, after 3 hours of driving, most of us want to take 15+ minutes to walk, stretch and hit the head.
But Jello is right too. The charging rate issue will be the only quibble they have when the price of BEV’s falls a bit more.

Under 10 minutes? More or less every time I used to fill up. It doesn’t take long whatsoever to begin filling up, lock the car, go and take a leak, come back and unhook it and leave. Most full ups are easily 5 mins or less.

This whole belief that people want to spend 30 mins filling up really is just lame. Not to mention I would get 400-500 miles a fill up. Not the 200 or so miles.

In order to be on a reasonable parity they need higher than 150kW charging.

I don’t think most people get in and out of a gas station in less than 10 minutes, DJ. There will always be outliers but most drivers who have been driving for more than 2 hours will spend at least 10 minutes walking then hitting the bathroom.
A gas pump can deliver 20 gallons in 2 minutes, but most of us spend more than 2 minutes in the bathroom. LOL! Between swiping your card, starting the fueling, walking over to the bathroom, doing your business, washing your hands, grabbing a bottle of water, paying for it, putting the nozzle back and driving away, do you really think you will get in and out in less than 10 minutes?
Whether you do an Indy speed pit stop in 5 minutes or a quick stop in 10 or a relaxed 15 to 20 minute charging session to recharge your car, I doubt that the trip would feel all that different.
But YMMV.

That is a good point, Scott. I only pump 3 gallons of gas every 4 or 5 months to keep it fresh, so I am not very familiar with pumping gas any more. I am at around 900 mpg in my Volt, plus around $25 worth of electricity a month!

And honestly, you’re in the minority when it comes to marathon driving. 5 minute turnaround on a 500 mile drive isn’t too important, save for a few like yourself who want to say they have that capability. When you subtract the ICE fuel time from the 20-25 minute Supercharging time, what are we really talking about? Maybe 15 minutes extra?

If you want to endure endless gasoline stops, oil changes, timing belt changes, smog checks, spark plug and spark plug wire replacement, fuel, water and oil pump replacements, hose replacements, transmission flushes, transmission clutch replacements, gasket replacements- in order to capture those 15 minutes, then I’d say you have more time, money, and patience than most that come to this site.

“20 minutes of charging at 150 kW will get you a long ways down the road. How often do drivers of gas cars get out of the gas station in less than 10 minutes?”

While I absolutely agree that a 10 minute charge time should be sufficient, and that those who keep saying that BEVs need to charge as quickly as filling the tank of a gasmobile are being downright silly, the difference between 10 minutes and 20 minutes is decidedly non-trivial. And it needs to be 300 miles worth of charging in that 10 minutes.

Competition will continue to drive faster and faster charging. I’m guessing we’ll eventually see BEV charging at somewhere around 1.4-1.5 MW, or possibly even higher, as a regular thing. Of course, that will require batteries with much lower internal resistance, which can be charged much faster without overheating. Perhaps solid state batteries?

I hear you Push, but I think we should be looking at how to get the charging speed to the point where 60% or 80% of the drivers think that the fast charging is fast enough, (given how seldom most drivers would need it) not 90% or 100% of the drivers. I think 15 to 20 minutes at 150 kW charging is a reasonable time for a charging session if it can get you 130 to 175 miles down the road.
Would 300 miles in 10 minutes be better? Yeah, but not if the expense of the faster charging made the arrival of these super fast chargers that much later and that much less common. Heat dissipation is a problem at 150 kW charging, as the rate goes up the complexity of the chargers is going to go up as well, as will the cost.
There are going to be people like DJ that will demand 300 kW charge rates before they would buy a BEV. I don’t think that the companies that build out the charging networks should let the most demanding people set the standard for what the charge rate should be. Make the charge rate required depend upon what most people are happy with, not what the DJ’s.
Not that there is anything wrong with driving like DJ does, but shaping the network around people like him would drive up the cost and delay the onset of “fast enough” DCFC’ers.
That opinion and $4 will get you a cup of Starbucks coffee….

If there is an ultrafast charging station on one side of the street selling fast charging in 20 minutes, and one on the other side of the street selling fast charging in 10 minutes at a price that’s not much higher, which one is gonna do more business?

Some of the assertions in this discussion are absurd. Most people do not want to spend 20 minutes at a gas station fiddling around and stretching their legs, not even on a long trip. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that only a very small percentage of people would actually prefer to spend that long hanging around a place that has no place to sit down.

Convenience is worth paying for. Not having to stand around waiting for your car to charge is worth paying for. Competition is already driving faster charging times, and will continue to do so. It’s downright silly to suggest otherwise.

You certainly do have a point that ultrafast charging stations are not going to cater to those who demand the car charge as fast as filling a gasmobile’s tank. There will be a “sweet spot” at which reducing the charging time by another minute is too expensive to justify the increase in cost. As you say or suggest, equipment which can deliver more power is more expensive, and at some point improving that becomes exponentially more expensive. A very high-power hookup to the grid is expensive, too, so that’s another cost limitation.

Of course, I don’t have the data to say just where that “sweet spot” will eventually wind up. And almost certainly neither do you nor anyone else reading this. I’m guessing that sweet spot will eventually wind up being somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes for 300 miles’ worth of electricity. (And maybe in a few years that will appear naive. 640 kilobites of memory should be enough for anybody! 🙂 )

I do know this: A Tesla spokesman once said they want to get charging time down to the neighborhood of 5 to 10 minutes. I presume whoever said that knows more about the realities and limitations than I do.

Yeah, I seem to have misplaced my crystal ball, so telling the future is not going to work for me. I didn’t get on the electric car band wagon until 2007 when I started reading Dr. Lyle’s GM Volt web site. 10 years later, the Volt is in second for US sales for the year, but the Teslas are in first and fourth, while the PriusPrime and the Bolt are moving up fast.
It is cool to see how the sales have increased and the tech has improved. Not as fast as most of us wished for, but faster than the FUDsters know what to do about.
I haven’t really thought about charging speeds much past 300 kW. Just getting to 600 kW charge rates would be incredible. 10 minutes at 600 kW (sans taper) would be around 100 kWh or around 350 miles of AER at a decent speed. 6 minutes would be 60 kWh or 210 miles of AER. That would be the stuff of dreams for me.
Like you said, it is impossible to guess where the sweet spot will be. Experts are making their prognostications in front of corporate boards all over the world. And most of them will be wrong. 😉
Your estimate/guess is as good as mine.

I think the whole charging speed discussion is pretty much beyond relevancy at this point. As you were alluding to, it’s not necessary to convince 100% of potential buyers at a point in time where market share (of true electrics) isn’t even one percent. In Norway the BEV market share has been more than 20% for a while now, but the fleet share is only approaching four percent and the charging situation is acceptable for most people despite at most (excluding Tesla) 50 kW chargers and many cars that cannot even fully exploit that.

I agree that faster charging is valuable. But it’s also certain to come. It seems to me almost impossible to imagine that not only demand, but also production capacity, could rise to, say, 50% BEFORE we get batteries and chargers that cope with at least 350 kW and probably considerably more. I think much more than 50% would be just fine with 150 kW.

Basically I don’t think charging speed will be a limiting factor for EV adoption, and therefore not relevant to that discussion. It is of course still relevant to some people who either have or would buy a car able to charge significantly faster than they can do today and often travel far enough for this to matter. But that is actually not many people, and the context here was with respect to EV adoption.

Of more concern to me is the commercial side of things. As usual government is largely incompetent with respect to new technology, and in Europe it would today be very inconvenient to go on international trips even if the chargers were 100 times faster and we had 300 miles of real world range! That’s because the different providers have different business models and payment systems. None have simple bank terminals like gas pumps do. Some require subscriptions. Many require you to use their app to pay. Some offer SMS payments. It’s all workable, but it adds hassle and inconvenience from everyone wanting to lock in customers as much as they can (locals everywhere being the important customer segment). And if you want to make sure you’re not paying much more than necessary it requires a lot of upfront research and planning. It’s complicated enough to work out where to charge for how long even without pricing, but it’s extremely hard when you also must account for five different price models!

The EU will probably step in to regulate access and pricing (not saying how much it should cost, but for instance banning price discrimination between locals and others, a very tempting instrument for all providers exactly because planning upfront is so difficult). But that may take many years still. We only got “roam like home” this year (equal pricing for mobile calls and data in all of EEC, so a provider may charge what they wish, but cannot charge differently for use domestically and abroad). Charging your EV could and should be just as easy and free of nasty surprises!

InsideEVs: it’s October. Why am I still being “moderated” (funny euphemism since what it actually means is “censored” – it’s not like someone is modifying my posts to make them more moderate and then publishing them)..? IIRC this was supposed to last until the end of September.

Yupe, you are all good. Sorry about that, was a case of no one being 100% on top of re-instating you here in the wee hours Sunday night (manual process). But I’m awake now and working it, all good now!

Looks like China will be well catered for with Superchargers. But what about Europe? There is not a single Supercharger or even destination charger in Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania. In fact, for someone travelling from say Germany to Finland via Baltic states there is no Superchargers between Poznan (Poland) and Vierumaki (Finland) which is 1,489 kms without any reasonable charging opportunity. Tesla’s Supercharger effort in Central Northern Europe is simply abysmal. I once had to put a Tesla on a truck to get it from Riga (Latvia) to Vilnius (Lithuania). That’s simply ridiculous!

“I once had to put a Tesla on a truck to get it from Riga (Latvia) to Vilnius (Lithuania). That’s simply ridiculous!”

What’s ridiculous is your insinuation that Teslae can only charge at Tesla superchargers. What, in all that distance you couldn’t find any place to plug in a perfectly ordinary extension cord into a standard wall outlet?

Perhaps you did load a Tesla car onto a truck to move it some distance (and perhaps you’re just posting FUD), but it certainly wasn’t because you couldn’t find a place to charge it!

The Pusher fo TSLA stock is at it again – this time Bullying like DJT a female. Way to go, pat your rear end. She was Just simply Pointing out an apparent Fact in her opinion. Why don’t you stick or even address those yourself? Notice that there are Zero Teslas being charged in the pic – given their Poor 11k car 2016 joke of a China market share. Why don’t you ask someone over there to setup live streaming vid cams to see the usage/occupancy rate each day of each month? Maybe then you will address the fuzzy math numbers – watch the nonsense for Q3 in a few days Vs insideEvs USA-verified real user registrations. I am sure the European vendors moving into electric will cater to their Home crowd, as Tesla is doing in CA.

Hey, troll. How’s your TSLA “short” investment doing? How much money have you lost this year?
😀 😀 😀

You’re the only one worried about Tesla’s stock price here, loser. Thankfully, since I’m not an investor, I feel free to say good things about Tesla when they deserve it, and negative things when they don’t. Too bad about you, troll!

It’s hardly relevant whether there are ANY charging opportunities along the route. What matters is if there is “reasonable charging opportunities” ENOUGH to make the trip reasonably convenient. Maybe there is, and maybe there is not. I haven’t checked. But nor does it seem like you have. Instead, it looks like a knee-jerk reaction to someone posting something critical of Tesla (unfairly perhaps, but you haven’t checked).

Government should just use EV subsidy to buy out Blink and provide free charging. Right now these charging sessions cost too much to provide any incentive to pay for it. Pay charge model is as expensive or more to charge than using gasoline for many plugin hybrids.

Yes, when you count a lawyer/doctor ridiculous billable hourly rate, the longer time to refill is certainly a loser proposition. But these people likely have others do that task or don’t drive many miles per year, Nor especially drive themselves to armpits such as Harris Ranch (cowdung capital of the world) or Baker/etc to Vegas. All the Ho-Hos and Yoohoo in the world hand-selected by TSLA/Elon isn’t gonna change that, but nice misdirection for Q3 huge miss (also the catapulting cars between cities a la Boring Company, and Mars mission, which has totally nothing to do with Model 3 production issues or peakModel S & X)

If you did that – charge a lawyer’s hourly rate – it would indeed be a losing proposition. But nobody charges $200 an hour for EV charging as far as I know, and that’s not a very expensive lawyer.

Moreover, for a fair comparison with fossil fuels you must account for the whole picture. Fast charging is a small part of the total for the typical EV owner.

I pay 2.50 NOK, about 30 US cents, per minute for DCFC in Norway. That works out to $18 an hour, which is a lot less than lawyers in Norway cost (although doctors are nearly free for the end user, completely so in many cases). Given that my average DCFC rate is no more than 35 kW (2012 LEAF) this means I pay more than 50 cents per kWh! So expensive, right?

Well, no. I use maybe $7 a month on average on DCFC. Nearly all my charging happens at home at a quarter of the price.

So you got the premise wrong (fast charging isn’t nearly as expensive as you said) and you failed to account for 95% of the picture. No wonder you reached the wrong conclusion!

All YOU People, whine and claim this Shorting or that. Never address the real facts because you are too invested in Pump & Dump rather than honesty.
Fake news and Facebook/Google antifa-liberal lies. If you had a brain, then you would read or do math to realize no one ever said anything anti-EV, and Tesla should just focus on Model 3 execution success rather than wetdream fantasies. but I guess that’s too boring or anti-ADD.

I actually agree with you on one thing: saying “you are saying that because you’re a troll” or “you’re saying that because you are shorting the stock” is no argument. I hate when people do that because IMO they are lending credibility to their opponent when they do, making it seem they haven’t got any actual arguments to come with. Better not to respond if one thinks someone a troll, or engage with what they actually said if one does reply.

That said, I am not under the impression that you are posting based on a good understanding of the facts. Your post above about charging cost for example is either ignorant or seeking to distort the facts, and I’ve posted a reply explaining why. And your reply here is basically, and ironically, repeating the crime you advise your interlocutor of – mudslinging speculation about WHY people say what they say rather than engaging with WHAT they said.

It’s a pity this site doesn’t have a comment system in place that notifies us of replies, I’d love to discuss the facts with you as I’m not only convinced of my own position, but equally convinced that I should re-evaluate it if it’s based on incorrect assumptions and facts. So should you, of course.

If the model 3 sells in the states as well as claimed then I take issue with the 50 stall installation being huge…. As far as China is concerned a 5000 ampere electric service at 240Y/416 is all they need.

Perhaps there will be several ’50’s in the states also, if and when the model ‘3’s start increasing sales.